Cyclones - “I’m In Heaven” (mp3)

I’ve never been sure whether the complete anticlimax in the first two lines of the chorus (”I’m in heaven now / It has to do with you”) is intentional. They do seem very serious, but on the other hand, the singer’s next two bands were called Cowboy & Spingirl and Toothpaste 2000, so she must have a sense of humor. You would think.

[From an EP whose details I can't remember at all. The same song-- I think rerecorded-- was on Cowboy & Spingirl's Odds And Bobs, which is available to eMusic subscribers.]

Cat Heads - “Apologize” (mp3)

Bay Area band. Drummer/vocalist Melanie Clarin was in the Donner Party around the same time and would go on to Harm Farm.

What I love best about “Apologize” is the expansiveness; all the instruments have a reverb-y sound to them (probably more because it was 1988 than because of the band’s intention) and Clarin sounds like she’s opening her mouth as wide as possible for every held vowel. That, and the guitar lines zipping around all over the place.

The Cat Heads now have a website with history and mp3s, including an alternate mix of “Apologize” here. I actually just discovered this now, and upon listening to the alternate mix I notice that it’s missing the reverb, and they’ve buried the guitar. Still a pretty good song.

My copy of the song came from a badly-worn tape; you probably don’t want to listen to it on headphones or good speakers, as it will be painfully clear that I had the levels too high when I dubbed it.

One day a fifty-year-old student of enlightenment said to Shinkan: “I have studied the Tendai school of thought since I was a little boy, but one thing in it I cannot understand. Tendai claims that even the grass and trees will become enlightened. To me this seems very strange.”

“Of what use is it to discuss how grass and trees become enlightened?” asked Shinkan. “The question is how you yourself can become so. Did you ever consider that?”

Hated Blueberry Boat. Hated hated hated. Eleanor Friedberger’s singing drips with the accidental insincerity of someone who thinks that a stylization they can’t quite reproduce is the key to a form of expression they can’t quite understand. I suspected I could have liked it if not for that, but the record used her voice so prominently that I couldn’t ignore it, even temporarily, for the purpose of figuring out whether it was worth learning to like her. Same problem with the lyrics: while friends promised me the record’s libretto had a brilliant and complex structure, the “bad” parts all intentional, I couldn’t handle 3-minute chunks of “Later at lunch with the taco lettuce crunch crunch / She sets herself apart the bunch” well enough to guess how I felt about an hour of it.

So the announcement that Eleanor and Matthew’s grandmother would be doing vocals on their next album made me much happier than it seemed to make most of the internet. Even better, this record’s about their grandmother, anchoring the attempts at verbal riffing in something more solid than Blueberry Boat’s half-assed historical fantasies.* Eleanor does sing, but she also talks (revealing that she doesn’t always sound Like That, which makes me less reluctant to despise her singing), and anyway Olga Sarantos has so much stronger a presence that I could often tune Eleanor out without disengaging from the music entirely.

The music! Maybe I persevere with the Fiery Furnaces because I think their music ought to be the largest obstacle to loving them, and I find it entertaining.

I know better than to keep listening to records which I want to defeat more than I want to absorb; this hovers right around the dividing line. I have to admit that that edge-riding aspect is pleasurable– maybe that’s part of it for their fans, too– but glimpses of the layers underneath suggest I wouldn’t require it. “He came from a family of priests / At least, there were a lot of priests in his family.” Is that any better than the thing about tacos? I think so.

* Not that I’d enjoy Blueberry Boat more if I learned its underlying story was true, nor that I currently know what that story is anyway.

Downloadable from the Waaaaaaah! memorial site owned by the label’s erstwhile owner. It originally came out as a 7″ in 1994.

I first heard of Sarah Records in 1991, but the DJ who played St. Christopher and Even As We Speak late at night on Madison’s community radio station didn’t explain who or what Sarah Records was. I asked after them at the local indie record store and the clerk shrugged.

In 1996, I discovered not just Sarah but the countless labels and bands they had helped inspire (which must include Waaah! and Picnic, though I hadn’t heard of the latter until a week ago). It was clearly over, whatever “it” was, but the internet hadn’t yet made knowing everything about everything as easy as it is now, so I had a little time to pick through the rubble on my own. I think the radio tape I’d been carrying around for five years vaccinated me against the post-hoc nostalgia that seemed to strike other people getting into indiepop around the same time; Field Mice albums weren’t a thing only the coolest people owned, they were a thing nobody owned, but the music existed anyway, just like with thousands of other LPs I discovered in my college radio station’s library.

So unfamiliar records of that era are still alien artifacts to me, but beautiful ones. Makes them hard to talk about, because on its face the music seems like it might not be interesting to folks who don’t have this history; I’m never sure. And I mean, the last song (”Home”) on here appears to be unironically and uninsightfully about Jesus, and I don’t even mind. How did THAT happen?

Life is good. “On”, the designer of Grow and Grow RPG (not to mention the mind-warping reflex games Hatch and Tontie) has a new Grow game called Grow Cube and a new blog where he’s already posted two small toys, with a third you can get by donating a few dollars.

I love games that self-document; games with oblique iconic instructions are almost as good. The new Grow doesn’t quite seem done (it’s version 0.1j), but that just means it’ll be worth playing through twice: once now, and once when all the flourishes are in.

Ivy Green - “The Damage”

I feel as though I should be able to connect this directly with some better-known band, but I can’t place it. Despite the horns, it doesn’t have the right rhythm to come off as ska. Not really disco. Not exactly new wave. You’ll have to pardon my obtuseness.

Huh, okay, the Dutch Rock & Pop Institute Encyclopedia says that they’re Dutch, this single is from 1983, and the music is “influenced by 60s beat music”. And finally, farther down the page– man, sometimes the Internet is kind of a bummer– it says somebody wanted to reissue the Ivy Green records on CD, but the band refused on principle. I will console myself with the thought that the rest of them might not actually be any good.

The idea of rock’n'roll as music for hoods occasionally seems to have taken root in a strange way in Scandinavia. The Caesars, for example, are now appearing in iPod ads but if I’m remembering right, the first album I heard by them began with a song about drinking gasoline and punching your girlfriend in the face. Something like that.

Anyway, I don’t know what “Don Juan Dracula” refers to, but the first thing it brought to my mind was the Fonz, for what that’s worth.

The record sounds like a lighter Faint, unravelling a bit into spaciness toward the end– pretty good. During the faster songs I get a flickering sense that it might change my life, but I think I’m just sleep-deprived.

Jonathan Coulton - “Shop Vac” (post with mp3)

This guy did a folksinger-ized version of “Baby Got Back” that’s apparently been all over the internet in the week since he posted it. After checking out most of his site I think “Shop Vac” is the winner: very, very hard not to sing along with and, come on, handclaps!

Coulton’s use of repeated phrases and of alcohol as shorthand for misery make him sound like John Linnell sometimes, especially in this song and in “I Feel Fantastic”, a song from the Our Bodies, Ourselves, Our Cybernetic Arms EP that Popular Science commissioned recently.

Franklin Bruno & Jenny Toomey - “Unionbusting” (mp3)

Looking back at the last several posts, I occasionally sound like a heartless collector fuck. Sorry about that. I’m accustomed enough to music where obscurity is taken as given that I’m always surprised and fascinated when a record generates a monetary force-field around itself. I don’t think it makes me cooler for a disc I own to become valuable; it’s like having a kid you knew in high school turn up ten years later in an awful and omnipresent TV ad– it’s interesting, but that doesn’t mean you want it to happen.

Anyway. Franklin Bruno (of Nothing Painted Blue) and Jenny Toomey (of Tsunami) had clearly both been taken with pre-rock 20th-century songcraft before they made this album together, with Bruno writing the songs and Toomey singing. I don’t know much about musicals, but this song reminds me of the ones I saw in high school– the extended metaphor, the emphasis on elegant rhymes. Most clever lyrics these days have a more uneasy relationship to cleverness. For all that, the song’s also a little sad.

[From Tempting, for whose contents I have to temper my praise by pointing out its unbelievably bad cover art.]